Widow testifies about handwriting

Note found at Osco scene not written by slain husband, she says.

Note found at Osco scene not written by slain husband, she says.

July 14, 2006|VIRGINIA BLACK Tribune Staff Writer

NEW CASTLE, Ind. -- Scott Dick did not live long enough to watch his two young children grow up, fall in love or graduate from high school. But the only thing that drew a smile from his widow while she was on the stand in a Henry County courtroom Thursday afternoon was the sight of their now-20-year-old daughter, Megan, sitting in the gallery before her. Tonya Dick, the widow of the 29-year-old assistant manager who was shot twice in the back and once in the head at the Western Avenue Osco Drug store in South Bend in 1990 along with co-workers Connie Zalewski and Tracy Holvoet, shed fresh tears as she was asked to identify Christopher Allen and photos of her husband's car and a bloody note found near his body. Yet when she pointed out Megan Dick, who was only 4 when her father died but is now a poised college student, most in the courtroom turned and beamed along with her. It was the emotional high point of a day during Allen's trial here filled with discussion of the note, the gun believed to be the murder weapon and others who could be suspects in the crimes. Tonya Dick said that after a memorial service that Osco held for the victims almost 16 years ago, two detectives pulled her aside and showed her the note. This is the third trial in which she has testified about whether her husband wrote it: "It is definitely not his handwriting," she said decisively. Meanwhile, a handwriting analyst testified Thursday that she could not say for certain either way whether the writing on the note, part printed, part in cursive -- White MAN Armor car uniform & badge -- was Allen's. But Bonnie Beal testified, "There are indications Mr. Allen wrote the words 'white man.'æ" Several former Osco co-workers also have testified that writing on the note looked like Allen's writing they had seen in the course of working with him there. Allen is black, and prosecutors contend that he wrote it to throw suspicion off himself. Other suspects Knowing that defense attorneys plan to make the case that police knew of other suspects but doggedly pursued Allen through the years, prosecutors Thursday also asked investigators about Stephen Bethel, a South Bend man in prison for two armed robberies in March 1991. Bethel told police later that an associate, Curtis Crenshaw, and he had cased the Osco store earlier to rob it and that later, Crenshaw had confessed to him his involvement in the killings. Capt. Richard Bishop of the South Bend Police Department described in detail the two convenience store robberies on March 5, 1991, for which Bethel and Crenshaw eventually were sentenced. Although the suspects fired guns at employees and customers and later at police, no one was hit. No fingerprints were found at the second scene, Bishop said, and the two used gloves at the first. Bishop said Crenshaw had claimed at the time that he was coerced into the two robberies because of a drug debt he owed to Bethel. Former South Bend homicide investigator David Dosmann, now with University of Notre Dame police, discussed interviewing Bethel in December 1991 in the St. Joseph County Jail. Dosmann said Bethel wanted to exchange information for a lesser sentence for the crimes he'd been convicted of, and Bethel offered to speak of some Bloomington, Ind., crimes, a 1986 South Bend homicide and the Osco case. Under cross-examination, Dosmann acknowledged that other tips had also come in from other sources who had heard Bethel discuss the Osco case. One scenario cited Bethel as the driver of the getaway car and involved Crenshaw's sister, Hattie Byers, who has since died. That contradicts a defense assertion that Bethel has said he watched Crenshaw throw a "dirty" gun into the St. Joseph River on the night of the killings. Dosmann also said authorities confirmed that some of the details of Bethel's information on one of the Bloomington crimes checked out, but that Crenshaw denied involvement in the case: "Curtis Crenshaw said that Stephen Bethel would have been behind any type of talk implicating" Crenshaw in the Osco case. Defense attorney Kevin McGoff pressed Dosmann, whose partner at the time was former investigator Michael Swanson, on why police did not contact Bethel's attorney or the prosecutor handling his cases at the time to try to glean more details from him. But Dosmann told prosecutors that at least two statements -- that Crenshaw had taken drugs from the scene and had entered the Osco store through the bolted back doors -- had been proved false, so "I didn't feel his information was credible." For earlier articles on this trial, see southbendtribune.com.